Today is the final day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, and while Bitcoin maximalists will have no shortage of meetups and parties to attend this evening and tomorrow, the end of the event will mark an end to formalities.
There have been plenty of highlights from the conference – including dozens of announcements from crypto and fintech companies in the space. Here are some of the announcements that major players made:
⚡ Strike expands horizons for Bitcoin payments on Lightning: Strike CEO Jack Mallers announced that Strike has created a Shopify integration for Bitcoin Lightning payments. However, they didn’t just stop there – Strike also struck a deal with NCR, opening up Bitcoin payments at major merchants such as McDonald’s.
🎰 Ledger rolls out new crypto hardware product: One of the foremost figures in the crypto hardware space, Ledger, finally rolled out its new product this week. The Ledger Nano S Plus is a $79 hardware wallet for the crypto-enthused, which has many of the high-powered features of their Nano X hardware wallet.
👛 Robinhood announces to integrate the Lightning Network in its wallet: This announcement doesn’t really have a lot of “wow factor”, but it’s a Bitcoin conference! The brokerage giant has been slowly but surely rolling out its long-awaited crypto wallets feature over the last few weeks, but has made its hefty waitlist of users eligible to start using the new feature immediately – and they put time on the conference calendar to share that they’d support Bitcoin’s fast and cheap layer 2, Lightning Network.
💸 SoFi announces crypto paychecks (again): SoFi users are likely already well-acquainted with the company’s latest crypto-focused feature, crypto paychecks. In short: you can send a portion of your direct deposit into your favorite crypto. This product has been out for a hot sec, but given its novelty, it makes sense why they emphasized and underlined it at the conference.
That’s just a short list of announcements that should garner interest to the maxis and crypto-curious alike – but naturally, as a shortlist, it excludes dozens of other announcements which added flavor to the conference. We’ll be touching on some of the others over the coming weeks.